KYUNG LEE AT FRINGE

Some creative personalities are acquisitive: Their minds absorb the passing culture the way sponges do water and they let it gush forth with the merest squeeze. Hae Kyung Lee is one of these.

Her choreography, on view Friday at the Downtown Dance Studio/LA Fringe Theatre, occupied only two spots on a five-part bill. But it managed to define aspects of the performance-art picture in a way that put the evening’s more dancey items to shame.

Imagine this scene: an area twice as a deep as it is wide in which one sees a surreal long-view of a menage a trois , an essay in brutality chic that might have been lifted from MTV.

One man sits at the distant upstage, vacantly smoking, while another, all the way downstage, seethes with angular tension. In between them is Lee, whose quest for masochism is exceeded only by her ecstasy of frustration. She stretches her upper torso--revealed nude through a white, gauzy afterthought of a thing that clings to perspiration--and convulses at intervals.

A floor light spots her glistening calves and by the end of this piece, appropriately called “Rut,� she and the active man writhe separately in their parallel crumpled plastic floor runners while the other reads a paper. Entirely captivating.

But when Lee explores primordial feminism, as in “Bega Orleyana,� she does so in a self-conscious way that could resemble a Jules Feiffer cartoon. Three seated women each carry out a Significant task: pouring dry rice into clay bowls, sloshing water in glass dishes and twisting fabric.

The other contributors--Lisbeth Davidow, Brina Gehry, and Julie Finch--seemed like freshman fugitives from a college dance department. Gilberte Meunier’s familiar “Cycloid� completed the program.